Academics From The United States

"Rousseauist and Baconian, though often superficially at odds with one another, have co-operated in undermining, not merely religious tradition, but another tradition which in the Occident goes back finally, not to Judea, but to ancient Greece. This older tradition may be defined as humanistic. The goal of the humanist is poised and proportionate living. This he hopes to accomplish by observing the law of measure. ... Decorum is supreme for the humanist even as humility takes precedence over all other virtues in the eyes of the Christian. Traditionally the idea of decorum has been associated, often with a considerable admixture of mere formalism, with the idea of the gentleman. Humanism and religion in their various forms have at times conflicted, but have more often been in alliance with one another. As Burke says in a well-known passage: "Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things that are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.""

"Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man's ordinary will to a higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality and humility."

"When the element of conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life, what remains is the irresponsible quest for thrills."

"Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: "I am an Epicurean.""

"Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma."

"To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image."

"What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control."

"When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians."

"True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard."

"Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks."

"Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of it, are wont nowadays to call themselves idealists. We should at least recognize that ideals in this sense are not the same as standards and that they are often indeed the opposite of standards. It would be easy to mention institutions of learning in this country that are at present engaged in breaking down standards in the name of ideals."

"The true dualism I take to be the contrast between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and the other as vital control (frein vital)."

"The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas."

"The complaint is often heard at present that there is an increasing exodus from the difficult and disciplinary subjects and a rush into the soft subjects. One good sign is that those who stand for the difficult and disciplinary subjects, e.g., the professors of physics and the professors of the ancient classics, are coming more and more to see that they must co-operate and not work at cross-purposes, as they have done only too often in the past, if they are to make head against the drift toward softness."

"I chanced recently to be glancing over … a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships, and that shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow indeed very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill."

"Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional nationalist; and that is because he saw that patriotic 'virtue' is a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration came in the French Revolution which began as a great international movement and ended in imperialism and Napoleon Bonaparte."

"The reasons for putting humanistic truth above scientific truth are not metaphysical but very practical: the discipline that helps man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race. Man in spite of what I have termed his stupidity, his persistent evasion of the main issue, the issue of his own happiness, will awaken sooner or later to the fearful evil he has already suffered from a science that has arrogated to itself what does not properly belong to it; and then science may be as unduly depreciated as it has, for the past century or two, been unduly magnified; so that in the long run it is in the interest of science itself to keep in its proper place, which is below both humanism and religion."

"The events of this story are morally indefensible. But the greed that motivated the human actors—excluding of course the slaves themselves—was so overwhelming as to be irresistible. It is impossible for us today who condemn the slave trade to imagine any effective opposition to it in the 17th century. A parallel in our time would be the unstoppable trade in narcotics. We can't stop the supply because we can't stop the demand. To the limitless demand for labor in the new world the slave trade was a limitless response. Like drugs today, laws against it were powerless, because the profits were so great. Opposition to the slave trade did come in time, in the principles of the American Revolution, but not before slavery had formed deep roots in the economy and polity of the United States. The foreign slave trade was outlawed by the United States in 1808, and it was made a capital crime in 1820, but the trade continued right up until the Civil War. It is good however to remind ourselves that no black slave was sold to a white slave trader, on the west coast of Africa, who had not already been enslaved by a black African. Slavery was an equal opportunity employer!"

"Here we can see that in an important way Curley is right after all. He denies that Spinoza’s in-relation (the relation of being in itself or in another) is an inherence relation. In doing so, Curley affirms that the in-relation just is the relation of causation. While I disagree with Curley about inherence, he is, I believe, absolutely right that the in-relation just is causation or, more generally, conception."

"I would like to point out that there is a deeper point here that transcends anything Spinoza might say about extension or thought in particular. This deeper point is a reflection of Spinoza’s naturalism and shows that, in the end, Curley is importantly right in one respect. Return to Curley’s interpretation. For him, modes are merely causally dependent on God, they do not inhere in God, they are not states of God. And, while Spinoza does say that modes are in God, by this, for Curley, Spinoza means only that they are caused by God. So, for Curley, there are two different kinds of dependence: inherence and what might be called mere causation or dependence that is not inherence. These are both kinds of conceptual dependence. The states of a thing would be conceived through the thing on which they depend, and Curley-esque modes as mere effects would be conceived through substance."

"Why, in his discussion of God’s indivisibility, does Spinoza focus on finite things, such as individual quantities of water? This emphasis would be out of place if Curley were right. For if he were right, God’s being extended is no threat at all to God’s indivisibility. Even if, per impossibile, individual bodies were capable of existence independently of God and of each other, this would not show that, for Curley, God, the extended substance, is divisible. This is so because, for Curley, God as extended is simply the attribute of extension, and the divisibility of the modes of extension which are, for Curley, somewhat ontologically removed from God would have no bearing on God’s indivisibility. But in 1p15s, Spinoza obviously does see individual bodies as having a bearing on God’s indivisibility, and this goes against Curley’s interpretation."

"Spinoza was, of course, deeply influenced by the Cartesian account of modes, and the main controversy in this area of Spinoza’s thought is the extent to which he tranformed this account. On the interpretation I will be offering, Spinoza does agree with Descartes that modal dependence involves both inherence and conceptual dependence, but he differs from Descartes because Spinoza sees inherence as nothing but conceptual dependence. For Spinoza, there is only one relation of dependence here, and not two as in Descartes. But how is this possible? How can a thing such as a table or your mind be a state or a feature of another thing such as God? Such objects are not, it would seem, ways in which God or anything else exists, rather they have an existence of their own. Curley often puts this worry by saying that modes, as Descartes conceives them, are properties or universals, while tables and minds are particulars, and no particular can be a universal. […] However, as we have seen, modes as Descartes and the tradition conceive them are not necessarily universals; rather, they may be, as it were, particularized properties, such as the table’s roundness or this roundness instead of mere roundness in general. On this understanding, modes would be particulars and thus, perhaps, of the right logical type. But to make this important point (as Carriero does so well) is not to eradicate the intuitive unease that Curley rightly feels at the thought that ordinary objects are modes in the Cartesian sense. This is because it may seem extremely implausible to regard the table, your mind, and your body as simply particularized states of something else. It seems almost as (if not equally) absurd to regard my body as a universal, as a property that God has, as it is to regard my body as a particular, namely God’s having that property. Such a view would seem scarcely intelligible; it does not do justice to our sense of the robustness that we and other ordinary objects seem to enjoy. This, I think, is the root objection that Curley and others have to treating Spinozistic modes as modes in the Cartesian sense."

"I am here to argue against the existence of the Christian God. I am not here to defend atheism, contrary to the impression Dr. Craig's talk might have given you. Look, I think there are many ways of thinking about God. And I think some of them are ways I might accept. I just can't accept the Christian God."

"We owe a debt of immeasurable gratitude to Harry Jaffa for recovering for us the true Lincoln and for helping us remember our sacred heritage, our nation's founding devotion to the truth of human equality and liberty, a truth applicable to all men at all times."

"Jaffa was perhaps best known for his contributions to our understanding of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought."

"Jaffa, one of Claremont McKenna's most distinguished professors, wrote an article twelve year ago about the election of 1996. In an election where several states will be voting on whether or not the Constitution's 14th amendment means what it says and where one party under John McCain has come out against racial discrimination, while the other votes for its candidate, Barack Obama, who pretty much is the affirmative action candidate, Jaffa's remarks twelve years ago in The Wall Street Journal are all the more important today. It's a long slog until we realize the dream Lincoln saw for us, but it won't be for lack of trying, as we inch, little to little, to the land where all men are created equal."

"Karl Marx; the great enemy of human freedom."

"I think if Obama is reelected, then that'll be a disaster of immeasurable proportions. If the government takes over large segments of the economy, we will become a socialist state. The salvation of the Republican Party, and of the country and of the world, will be changing the conservative moment to reflect the principles of Abraham Lincoln. The platform on which Lincoln was elected in 1860 quoted part of the Declaration of Independence. Government is based on the consent of the governed."

"Remember, the ultimate object of Marxist Communism is to return to the Garden of Eden with no forbidden fruit. That’s the goal of libertarianism as well. And we’re marching rapidly in that direction. Morality is disintegrating in front of our eyes."

"The art of politics is judging what circumstances permit and what they forbid. Look at the reputation of, say, John Brown and the abolitionists before the Civil War. Lincoln had very harsh things to say about John Brown in 1859. The Civil War vindicated John Brown."

"We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln. Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization."

"The "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence didn't mean radical individualism. It meant the pursuit of virtue."

"Marx saw morality as the great enemy of human well-being and now the society of the future is one in which moral distinctions based upon the Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition will dissolve. Without even knowing it, we are moving into a Communist world. Without a revolution, we are moving into the world that Marx wanted."

"The Secretary of State, the President, they all talk about "values". A "value" is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said: "The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality." If you had said, "Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?'" Washington would have replied, "What the hell are you talking about?""

"Lincoln thought slavery was wrong and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."

"The issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. Not similar to it. Identical. It is a question of whether the people make the moral order or the moral order makes the people."

"He didn't care whether slavery was voted up or down, he cared only for the sacred right of the people to make that decision. Why the right of the people should have been sacred, if the results of the exercise of that right were indifferent, Douglas never undertook to say."

"The South knew that it would never in future possess the same power relative to the North that it did in 1861. From that perspective, it was now for never or Southern independence, if slavery was to be preserved."

"If we are to have a foundation upon which to continue to build a more perfect union, we must return unequivocally, as Lincoln returned, to the source of our greatness in the American Founding."

"To ask whether what the American people in the Declaration of Independence had affirmed as truth was in fact truth, was now said to be meaningless. But if History or Progress or 'change' is to be our guide, if the truth of relativism is to replace the truth of the Declaration, then the cause for which the nation fought at its birth, and in the Civil War, was meaningless, too. White power, black power, the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, are as justifiable as Jefferson, Lincoln, or the doctrine of the equal natural rights of all human beings. We may understand how the Rev. Jeremiah Wright could so awfully misunderstand the American political tradition, inasmuch as it has been so very misunderstood for so long in circles from whom a better understanding could be expected. But this misunderstanding is a cancer which can in the end prove fatal, not only to a political campaign but to our country."

"This changed attitude toward slavery was, however, part of a changed attitude toward morality in general that was sweeping over Western civilization. This change was marked by the apotheosis of "change" itself. What had heretofore been regarded as moral absolutes came to be regarded as merely relative to a particular time and place—to History or Progress—with no enduring claim upon our consciences. Lincoln praised Jefferson for embodying in the Declaration "an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times." But the idea of such truth, and of the correlation of such truth with justice, was increasingly repudiated by the most educated and influential minds in the Western world. Representative of this triumph of historicism and moral relativism was historian Carl Becker's assertion in a landmark 20th-century work that "To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.""

"In the decade from the Declaration to the Constitution every state north of the Mason Dixon line, and north of the Ohio River, either abolished slavery or adopted measures leading to abolition. But in 1793 the cotton gin was invented, shortly after the power loom in England. This was the onset of the industrial revolution. Almost overnight, a new industry or rather a series of new industries, proliferating worldwide, was born. It began with the growing of cotton but was followed by its manufacture into a wide variety of products, especially cotton cloth and cotton clothing. Suddenly, slave labor became vastly more profitable. In the decade before the Civil War, the value of slaves doubled. Once again, greed overwhelmed all other motives. From being regarded as a temporary evil, as it was at the founding, slavery came to be regarded as a positive—and permanent—good."

"The Declaration of the causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, on July 6, 1775, was the very first occasion for the American people to speak to the world with a single voice. In its first sentence, the Second Continental Congress affirmed without equivocation that the idea of the ownership of some human beings by other human beings was an utter absurdity, and that to think otherwise was incompatible with reason or revelation. Thus from the outset—a year before the Declaration of Independence—the American people were committed to the antislavery cause, and to the inseparability of personal freedom and free government. The American people knew from the outset that the cause of their own freedom and that of the slaves was inseparable. This would become the message that Abraham Lincoln would bring to the American people, and to the world, for all time."

"What exactly did these words, of both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, mean? They meant that there was no difference, between one human being, and another human being, that made one the master and the other the servant. As Jefferson once put it, some men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor are others born booted and spurred to ride them. That a man or woman rides a horse corresponds with the difference in their natures. No injustice is done to the horse! That an ox should pull a plow, while a man walks behind, is according to nature. In these cases, servitude follows from the laws of nature. But these same laws of nature tell us that when a human being is subjected to other human beings as if he were a horse or an ox, the laws of nature are violated. All human beings are accordingly equal in their right not to be enslaved, and in their right to be in secure possession of their lives, liberties, and property. To this end they have a right to be governed only by laws to which they have consented."

"The principles upon which this nation was founded are those upon which its survival, no less than its prosperity, depend. These are the principles upon which we believe our freedom and prosperity as individuals, and that of our children depend. These principles are simple and familiar enough for anyone to understand who wishes to understand. Selfish motives, miseducation, or ideological blindness may lead some to deny or disparage them. But nothing can obscure their shining truth... Lincoln at Gettysburg said that the nation, at its birth, had been dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Earlier, Lincoln had said that the proposition of equality was the 'central idea' of the founding, from which all its minor thoughts emanated."

"Unless we as a political community can by reasoned discourse re-establish in our own minds the authority of the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and of Lincoln, of government devoted to securing the God-given equal rights of every individual human being, we will remain ill equipped to bring the fruits of freedom to others."

"According to many of our political and intellectual elites, both liberal and conservative, the minority in a democracy enjoys only such rights as the majority chooses to bestow upon them. The Bill of Rights in the American Constitution—and similar bills in state Constitutions—are regarded as gifts from the majority to the minority. But the American Constitution, and the state constitutions subordinate to it have, at one time or another, sanctioned both slavery and Jim Crow, by which the bills of rights applied to white Americans were denied to black Americans. But according to the elites, it is not undemocratic for the minority to lose. From this perspective, both slavery and Jim Crow were exercises of democratic majority rule. This is precisely the view of democracy by the Sunnis in Iraq, and is the reason they are fighting the United States."

"Our difficulty in pursuing a rational foreign policy in the Middle East—or anywhere else—is compounded by the fact that we ourselves, as a nation, seem to be as confused as the Iraqis concerning the possibility of non-tyrannical majority rule. We continue to enjoy the practical benefits of political institutions founded upon the convictions of our Founding Fathers and Lincoln, but there is little belief in God-given natural rights, which are antecedent to government, and which define and limit the purpose of government. Virtually no one prominent today, in the academy, in law, or on government, subscribes to such beliefs. Indeed, the climate of opinion of our intellectual elites is one of violent hostility to any notion of a rational foundation for political morality. We, in short, engaged in telling others to accept the forms of our own political institutions, without any reference to the principles or convictions that give rise to those institutions."

"The United States is engaged today in a great mission to spread democracy to the Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and continuing with Iraq. The inhabitants of Iraq are divided into many groups and factions that hate and distrust each other. The attitude of Sunni and Shia Muslims toward each other resembles that of Catholic and Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century, which persist today in northern Ireland, each regarding the other as heretics. Under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the minority of Sunnis persecuted the majority Shias. It is understandable that the minority Sunnis are today resisting majority rule, while the majority Shia favor it. The Sunnis clearly believe that majority rule by Shia will be used as a means of retribution and revenge. The Sunnis look upon majority rule by the Shia the way the South looked upon the election of Lincoln in 1860. It is inconceivable to the Sunnis that the rule of the Shia majority will be anything other than tyranny. Indeed, it is inconceivable to them that any political power, whether of a minority or a majority, would be non-tyrannical. The idea of non-tyrannical government is alien to their history and their experience. They regard our assertions of Jeffersonian or Lincolnian principles as mere hypocrisy, as they see no other form of rule other than that of force. Our government assumes that the people of the Middle East, like people elsewhere, seek freedom for others no less than for themselves. But that is an assumption that has not yet been confirmed by experience."

"The great difficulty in forming legitimate governments is in persuading those forming the governments that those who are to be their fellow citizens are equal to them in the rights, which their common government is to protect. Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century Europe looked upon each other as less than human, and slaughtered each other without pity and without compunction. It was impossible for there to be a common citizenship of those who did not look upon each other as possessing the same right of conscience. How one ought to worship God cannot be settled by majority rule. A majority of one faith cannot ask a minority of another faith to submit their differences to a vote. George Washington, in 1793, said that our governments were not formed in the gloomy ages of ignorance and superstition, but at a time when the rights of man were better understood than in any previous age. Washington was right, in that such rights were, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in America, better understood. But they were not perfectly understood, as the continued existence of chattel slavery attests. A difference concerning the equal rights of persons of color made the continued existence of a common government of all Americans impossible. A great civil war had to be fought, ending the existence of slavery, reuniting the nation and rededicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal."